Birdcry
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: [AU] Trying to save one human is useless when evolution will weed out those who refuse the perfect genotype. Fortunately, Thomas disagrees, especially when Relena's concerned.


**A/N:** Since Nanami isn't given a surname in the series, I've given her her voice-actor's instead (the original japanese dub one).

Challenges:  
The Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, Looking for the Forbidden Land (event), using the prompts: birds, explode, unarmed, light yellow, Introduction to Poetry (Billy Collins)  
Digimon Dawn Remake Challenge, Registration: write from the POV of a male character  
The One Ship Boot Camp, #005 - talent  
The 28 Days of Love Challenge, Day 28 - write your current OTP  
The Diversity Writing Challenge, e17 - write a fic in first person without mentioning the name of the narrator

Enjoy!

* * *

 **Birdcry**

Relena likes birds. They fly freely in the sky. They eat crumbs off her hands and let her pet their features for a fleeting moment before they're off again. And I like it when she smiles, so birds were always associated with Relena smiling: happy memories, fond times -

Until I met Nanami Onou.

She works in Doctor Kurata's lab. Doctor Kurata I don't particularly like - never have and probably never will. There's something serpentine about his face. Something that makes me think he'll lash out with a poisonous bite if anyone so much as displeases him and he was one of the brightest minds of his generation, so as high as my IQ was, I wasn't greatly confident in my ability to outwit him at that stage.

From the use of past tense there, I'm sure you've realised I do eventually outwit him, but that's an entirely separate matter. I'm writing now about Nanami Onou.

And from the tangent I began with, about my little sister and birds, I'm sure you also realise what animals she works with.

They're DNA specialists, the Kurata lab. The Daimon lab is as well, actually, but they approach DNA in an entirely different way. DNA may as well be synonymous with the soul - which has led to quite interesting observations about emotion, behaviour and power, but when it came to Relena's sickness, I was wasting my time with them. Or so I'd felt. Turned out I'd discovered and learned much in the two year tenure, before I'd applied for a transfer. In retrospect, I should have applied for a temporary leave of absence but luckily the current head was happy to have me back.

Kurata's solution to my sister's malady was, simply put, to turn her into a chimera. Sometimes I wonder if Kurata is himself a chimera. He does have enough snake features to give the impression, I think. But Nanami is like that as well, and I wonder if it's simply not a side-effect of the environment, of the sort of research they do - because one has to be quite desensetised to animals as a whole to be able to watch the effects of changing their core so profusely.

In any case, to say Nanami works only with birds would be to misspeak, but she does work primarily with them. Another of the scientists work with frog chimeras, fusing frog genes with the virus and then manipulating the concentration of human female hormones in the sample to control or eradicate the virus. It was an interesting feature of those particular type of frogs that allowed anything fused with them to be controlled by something produced naturally in the human body, and moreso in states like pregnancy. Almost amusing to think how the pill that scores of young women were on could become a preventative measure for such mutant viruses - but useless in an application sense, because they'd have to commit an act of bioterrorism to get such mutants spreading across the population.

Unfortunately, Kurata is quite capable of bioterrorism, as I found out a little later down the track. But my little working relationship with Nanami was under the carpet by then.

She was assigned to initiate me into the lab, so to speak. Show me around, show me the ropes, try to interest me with her research and be the ear I could talk to about my own. And she was clever. A little older than me, I think - I never really asked her. But I could talk naturally with her. Or so I thought at first, until something on a more instinctual level stopped me from entertaining her more inquisitive probes.

She was clever, but also distant. It showed in the way she talked. Especially about people, when we arrived to the purpose of my research, and above my sister. When she asked what her favourite animal was, I foolishly told her: 'birds.'

She showed me her birds. Some of them were horrific: the ones with skeletal wings who seemed incapable of flight but their instinct seemed to propel them into the air, the ones with owl-like eyes screeching as soon as a light in a box went on. 'They're the failures,' she said crisply, moving down and tapping a cage right at the end. 'These ones are more promising.'

At first, I thought they might not be chimeras at all - or at least not yet. But then I realised they were. Their differences were more subtle, and the most telling thing were their voices. I hadn't been around birds long enough to recognise the sounds, but they looked like one species but sounded like a multitude of them, more than possible with the number of birds in the cage. And there was something disturbing about the symphony they combined to make. Like nails on a chalkboard, or a CD scratching.

'Even the sound of one's voice is inscribed in the DNA blueprint,' she explained. 'However they're limited to only one core sound, no matter how they vary pitch, tone or amplitude. That's why voice recognisers are able to pick out a person's voice despite attempts to disguise that voice.'

'By increasing the DNA pool, you increase the possibilities of different sounds being inherited by the next generation,' I concluded, 'and to have multiple phenotypes in the one individual, you're overcoming the switching-off effect of genes as well.'

'In the current setting, yes.' She looked pleased at him. 'At the moment, we've observed no pattern between the different phenotypes and the time of expression, so that's something we'll need to work out before we can further manipulate their genes or behaviour.'

But why? I found myself wondering. What was the point of increasing the gene pool for something so...trivial?

I didn't ask her then. I did later though, when I'd noticed the frigidity to animals, to humans, to emotions and even ethics that seemed to permeate through the lab.

It was a few weeks before I did.

Those first few days, it was just getting used to the new environment, the new equipment, the new workspace. The gloves they used were transparent vinyl instead of blue latex-free and they didn't cling to my hands in quite the same way. After a while, I also noticed how unnerving it was to touch a mouse with transparent gloves. They were as thin as the latex-free, but somehow without the colour I felt more exposed.

And the interest everyone shows...doesn't feel so much as curious as judgmental.

'You're wasting your time,' Nanami said to me one day. She'd kept the closest eye on me. Interest, she'd called it, to have someone near enough to her age in the lab and with intellect. But with the same voice she'd also called my research into saving my sister a "waste of time", so I can't mirror her interest with that level of disregard. And I said so quite frankly when the time came.

'I want to cure my sister,' I replied. 'It's the whole reason I'm in this field.'

'So if you cure her, then you'll drift through the rest of your life, utterly bored,' she concluded. I don't know why she drew that conclusion, when I could have just as easily been enjoying my time with my now healthy sister, watching her do all the things she'd missed out on, and perhaps pursuing another interest in life I'd disregarded to make room for a research career. 'Such a waste, when of the ten thousand drugs designed in a screen, only one, if that, will survive. And the amount of specimens lost in the process...'

'Human trials have almost no mortality,' I countered. 'And when there's anything close, they're stopped immediately and taken to the pre-clinical stage.'

'Because humans believe themselves to be superior in their own arrogance.' She turned away as she said this, twirling her hair and sounding so dispassionate about the whole conversation that I wondered if she was thinking of herself as a different and more superior species to humankind, but her next statement implied otherwise. 'Once we evolve, the old humanity will be just as disposable.'

'So that's the ultimate goal of this lab?' I asked. It was glaringly clear, all of a sudden, and I cursed by blindness in getting tangled with it. 'Manipulate genetics so completely that you can create the perfect lifeform, and then change those you will for a new world and discard the rest as non-important.'

'If you want to think that way.' She turned back to me and smiled, as though we were arguing about precisely what shade of light yellow her hair was instead. 'We're exterminating nothing. Humans have cast their lot with the world, after all. We are simply improving ourselves - and whoever wants to be improved.'

'Many dictators in history have said the same,' I said.

Her face darkened. For the first and only time I've known her, she showed an emotion other than mere distance. It would have been interesting to see how she looked when she lost her temper entirely - but also dangerous, perhaps. Particularly in a laboratory that was as much a biological hazard as a sharps one. 'You are a waste. All that talent but not the ambition to back it up.'

Which I find rather amusing, now, in retrospect. Research has shown that a more focused...well, focus, is far stronger than a diffuse one. In other words, trying to change the world is a rather difficult, and flimsy goal. Trying to affect a single person, whether oneself or someone else, is more focused and therefore more attainable. And humans are, to some extent, aware of their own limitations. The impossible wishes are not invested in so much as the attainable ones. My trying to cure Relena was far more attainable than trying to evolve the world through unnatural means.

That wasn't quite what made me leave the lab. It was a different matter entirely, involving Kurata moving into human trials with some DNA adjustments of his own and asking for Relena as a test subject. My father accepted. I objected but I had no say in the matter, being merely her brother and a new face in the lab.

That was where I outsmarted him and snatched my sister, and my research (which, ironically, had gotten nowhere) right out from under his nose and marched right back to Daimon labs.

I think I might have startled Doctor Sampson in doing it as well. It was a very impulsive move, in the end. He had not thought me capable in sabotaging the equipment, snatching Relena, and marching right out.

In that sense, I'm not sure I can call it "outsmarting". It was more undersmarting. An impulse. A very Marcus thing to do (Marcus being the type of guy who relied on serendipity to find things and often got himself into strife by ignoring normal science). It worked, though. Relena wasn't turned into a lizard chimera (yes, he'd been working with lizards, and my suspicion is not for regeneration like he claimed) and I hadn't been roped into something entirely illegal - because less than a month down the road, Kurata died in a botched act of bioterrorism (and when I say botched, the Daimon labs actually had an active part in the botching) and the lab and all its research was seized and examined for integrity.

I haven't seen the reports on the consequences, but being involved in bioterrorism meant they were going to come down with quite a heavy penalty. Luckily, I hadn't been there long, had the logs from my experiments to prove I hadn't done anything related to the incident, had reports from Doctor Sampson about my character and the official report of "stealing a test subject" from Kurata, filed in their system when they'd barred me from the building forever more.

I've drifted off on a tangent again, it seems. So there were Relena and birds. And Nanami Onou. Fortunately, Relena had never seen the mutant birds. But their grating symphony had burnt itself into my mind and I heard their echo for months afterward, even when all they were doing was chirping, quite naturally, in my sister's ears.


End file.
